Do Academic Honesty Statements Work?
Abstract:
Many colleges have attempted to deal with student cheating by using “academic
honesty statements,” or statements that students must read and acknowledge
that they will follow. In this article, the authors conduct a randomized controlled
experiment that investigates the impact of academic honesty statements on
college student examination performance, using an objective measure of student
examination performance as a proxy for student cheating. Overall, the authors
find no statistically significant differences in the test performance of students
who are given the academic honesty statements and those who are not. These
results indicate that academic honesty statements do not affect student perfor-
mance in a significant way, so their use is unlikely to be a reliable tool in reducing
cheating. However, other explanations are possible.
